Stephen Morse, director of the center for public health preparedness at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, says progress is being made in developing new, fast techniques that would allow a diagnosis well before conventional signs and symptoms manifest themselves. "You will not be able to give a city of eight million people antibiotics for weeks if you think they've been exposed to anthrax," says Morse. "You'd like to be able to find the ones who really need it and get to them first." Morse, commenting in an interview, is a former program manager in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This federal agency is funding a number of projects to develop those speedy techniques.
One approach is to analyze the way the genes of an infected person react. Marti Jett, chief of the molecular pathology department at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and her colleagues, ...
